Posted on 01/13/2002 8:47:59 AM PST by aculeus
He was the originator of the most dangerous idea in history. He disenfranchised God as our creator and revealed the animal origins of humanity. Many believe his influence was pernicious and evil.
But now a campaign has been launched to establish an international day of celebration on 12 February: birthday of Charles Darwin, author of the theory of evolution by natural selection.
'Along with Shakespeare and Newton, Darwin is our greatest gift to the world,' said Richard Dawkins, honorary president of the Darwin Day Organisation. 'He was our greatest thinker. Any campaign to recognise his greatness should have a significant British contribution.'
The Darwin campaign was launched by US activists two years ago to resist the anti-evolution campaigning of fundamental Christians. Now the aim is to create global celebrations by 2009, the bicentennial of his birthday.
'We have little chance of getting a national holiday for Darwin in the US - there is far too much anti-science and pseudoscience,' said project organiser Amanda Chesworth.'We are more likely to get one established in Europe, particularly in Britain, his birthplace.'
Celebrations will include seminars and lectures, and the showing of films and plays on Darwin's life, though other ideas include an atheist giving Radio 4's Thought for the Day, and a lesson on evolution being preached at Westminster Abbey. 'I'd do it like a shot,' said Dawkins.
Darwin was originally religious. He saw nature's diversity as proof of God's existence. Only a divine creator could be responsible for such marvels, it was then thought. But, after travelling the world in the Beagle, and after years of thought and experiment at his Down House home in Kent, he concluded that natural selection offered a better explanation.
Life forms better suited to their environments live longer and so have more offspring, thus triggering an evolution of species moving into new ecological niches. As philosopher Daniel Dennett said, it was 'the single best idea anyone has ever had... ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else.'
It is also remarkably simple. 'You can explain natural selection to a teenager,' said UK biologist John Maynard Smith. 'You have difficulty with Newton and little chance with Einstein. Yet Darwin's idea is the most profound. It still haunts us.'
Nor is opposition to Darwin confined to religious figures. Sociologists, psychologists and others involved in social policy hate natural selection, said Maynard Smith. 'They deny human behaviour is influenced by genes and evolution. They want to believe we are isolated from the animal kingdom. It is damaging, intellectual laziness. That is why we need a Darwin Day.
This point was backed by biologist Steve Jones. 'If you look at Africa, US fundamentalism, and the Muslim world, you realise evolution supporters are outnumbered by creationists. Yet these are people who have deliberately chosen to be ignorant. They are flat-Earthers without the sophistication. We need a Darwin Day to counter that ignorance.'
It exists. It is a massive body of evidence, accumulated over generations. It provides a chronological record of the species that have existed on Earth in the past. (Well, some of them, because we certainly haven't found all fossils, and it's entirely likely that some species didn't get fossilized.) There is only one coherent explanation for the fossil record, and that explanation is also consistent with the DNA evidence as well. That explanation is evolution.
Quick version (since I don't grok it all myself) - the various slight differences in the layout of the energy (note - it was VERY hot - energy, not matter) that came out of the big bang slowly coalesced as it cooled to form quarks, which then came together via the strong/weak nuclear force to produce protons (and thus, the lighter elements such as hydrogen), then neutrons and electrons. Through gravitational attraction, they came together and began to form "dust clouds" which over time formed stars. From the nuclear reactions occuring at intense heat and pressure in the hearts of the first generation of stars that then exploded in supernovae, the heavier elements were formed, which were then able to coalesce into second generation stars with further gravitationally attracted dust clouds around them that became planets.
Evolution, so far as I know, has never attempted to explain the cause of the big bang (or whatever began the universe), or explain the first self-replicating organism. It only describes what happens afterward. Current thought is that the "primordial soup" (nutrient rich liquid substrate covering the early Earth's surface) at some particular point contained a peculiar sequence of nucleotides and basic organic chemicals that "reproduced" -- not out of conscious thought, but out of the simple interaction with the environment, much like how DNA (nothing more than a chain of chemicals) is able to "replicate" by simple chemical attractions and reactions after being split by RNA polymerase.
If the necessary ingredients for life (energy and organic compounds) are there, self-replicating strands of Stuff will appear. That energy that is being added is coming from an external source, in our case the Sun. Evolution only occurs on a local scale, which is why Earth is considered an open system for this discussion. If you take the entire universe into account, every little piece of life that has ever existed on earth is an INFINTESIMAL amount of matter that doesn't affect the overall entropy of the system in the slightest.
Got to run, daughter getting tired and I have to prepare a court filling for tomorrow. No I'm not an attorney, just and engineer who prevailed in court without the aid of one of the bloodsuckers. I'll look at your 100s of sites when I get more time. It was a pleasure talking with you all.
Do you have a good site for carbon dating in there?
Welcome to the Hall of Human Ancestors .
Do you have a good site for carbon dating in there?
Yes, a few.
Many people are simply anti-religious and latch on to evolution for that reason and give the rest of us a bad name. There's no good in it at all.
If there was ever any doubt that Darwin is the evolutes messiah this article should remove it. I'm not sure if evolution happened or not; I'm not smart enough to know. But one thing I know for certain is that evolution requires an act of faith.
And I will reserve my act of faith for my creator.
And Gould and the boys can snit about it all they like.
P.S. Note to S. Gould: How's the bust of Lenin, you are reputed to have in your office, doing? Is it the purges you so admire? The torture tactics? Is this the "sophistication" so admirable in the evolution of evolution?
Two things:
1) the Universe is, by definition, a thermodynamically closed system during its entire existence. Whatever the total entropy of the Universe was at the time of the Big Bang, it has been increasing ever since then. This does not preclude thermodynamic processes within the Universe from experiencing a decrease in entropy at the expense of the net entropy of process and its environment.
2) There is no "before" the Big Bang, because time came into existence as a result of the Big Bang. In the absence of time, it is impossible to construct any meaningful concept of temporal order, and thus concepts such as "before" and "after" have no meaning outside of a Universe in which time exists.
I'm not an atheist, but I don't follow your reasoning. Why are atheists morons? As far as I can tell, atheists have the same mental range as theists, they simply do not believe in any divinity. Conversely, because pagans believe in many divinities, are they perforce super geniuses in your book?
'Along with Shakespeare and Newton, Darwin is our greatest gift to the world,' said Richard Dawkins, honorary president of the Darwin Day Organisation. 'He was our greatest thinker. Any campaign to recognise his greatness should have a significant British contribution.'
I did not know that Britain already has the Shakespeare Day and the Newton day.
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